The Top 27 Songs Of 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,' Ranked, Ruthlessly And Dispassionately
It's over.
After four seasons and 157(!) original songs, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend came to an end Friday night, with a supremely satisfying finale that felt both surprising and inevitable, which is precisely the needle that finales need to thread. (And how about that concert special? With the surprise reveal of Michael Hyatt — the show's MVP recurring cast member — at the end? I may have whooped.)
We're devoting an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour to a full appreciation of this remarkable series, but it bears repeating that simply as a feat of logistics, the show's ability to write, choreograph, record, perform and edit so many elaborate musical numbers on a television production schedule remains mind-boggling.
To business: I have, for the show's first three seasons, assiduously and scientifically ranked the show's songs. I was going to do so for season four, and then for the show's entire run, but when I went to print out my rankings of the first three seasons it came to 25 pages.
Which is just, you know, a lot. Too much, arguably!
Hence this concentrated list, distilling the show's all-time best 27 numbers. (Why 27? Because I was originally gonna do 25 but couldn't bring myself to leave two favorites off the list. Is why.)
There are other best-of lists out there, of course. But the ones I've seen suffer greatly from recency bias, as they were not prepared with the rigor, the cool objectivity, the razor-like dispassion of this list, which rests on the same two criteria it always has:
1. Reprises and medleys do not qualify — because they, as any decent musical theater epidemiologist will tell you, make the data noisy.
2. The songs that earn the highest berths in this ranking do so because they move. They establish an idea, and then go someplace surprising with it; that's always been the genius of the show's writers. Now, not every song can contain an epiphany, but the ones that legitimately transcend the genre they're spoofing in some way are the ones that end up here.
If I've written up a given song before, I'll include the blurb, then comment on how my thinking has changed. Because my thinking on many of these songs has changed, over time. Some that earned #1 rankings in past seasons have slid down a bit, others have hurled themselves higher up. A handful of songs have taken on added resonance, now that the show is over and can be regarded as a whole.
But before we get to the ranking, let's tick off the
Honorable Mentions:
These are the numbers that have
